Cisp

__C__asper's __I__nstant __S__ound __P__rograms

cisp is a simple (scheme inspired) interpreter that translates "Cisp" code into ChucK code

Cisp is my live coding tool that is specifically targeted at:

1. Non-standard synthesis (the use of compositional techniques directly on generating waveforms).
2. Algorithmic composition generating live Midi or OSC output.

video demo

Requirements / Setup

Install Chuck

You can use the official installer, https://chuck.stanford.edu/release/ Or use homebrew on MacOS

brew install chuck

Fetch CISP dependencies

CISP relies on a set of classes I wrote for Chuck ("Chuck-Tools"), and a bunch of personal "Chugins", which are audio-rate plugins for chuck.

You can fetch both by just grabbing the submodules:

git submodule update --init --recursive

This will fetch chuck-tools and chugins.

Naturally you will need to have installed git to be able to do this (on MacOS, I again recommend using Homebrew for this).

Build my chugins.

Cisp uses a number of custom unit generators, known in ChucK as "chugins". You will need to build them from source. The most important are Buffer, Clip and Linseg.

1. Within the CISP folder, go to cd submodules/chugins
2. make make mac|windows|linux
3. install them with sudo make install

I am currently using ChucK version 1.5.5.0. A common error happens when the API of Chugins is updated to a new version, and is different from the version of ChucK you have installed. You will see a warning when you try to run ChucK with my chugins. To see those errors you need to run ChucK in verbose mode: chuck --verbose:5. In this case you will need to fetch the updated version from https://github.com/ccrma/chugins so you have the correct up-to-date headers (the /chuck folder). In some cases you may even need to change some code (if they drastically change the API for chugins :-). But in most cases my chugins are rather simple.

Live coding setup

Good you are now ready to test CISP.

To run a CISP program, we will want to start the ChucK virtual machine, with the chugins and chuck-tools classes loaded. I do this on my own machine with the following:

chuck --bufsize:1024 --loop --chugin-load:auto --chugin-path:/usr/local/lib/chuck --verbose:1 ~/devel/chuck/cisp/submodules/chuck-tools/tools.ck

You should see a whole bunch of classes being loaded in the virtual machine. You only want to see green lines in the prompt, no orange or red. watch out: paths can be case sensitive!!!

You will want to replace ~/devel/chuck/cisp with your own location to where you cloned the CISP repo.

You may need to adjust this, if you want to use a different audio device (see chuck --help & chuck --probe-devices). It may also be that on windows or linux, the chugins are installed elsewhere.

Create new textfile and name it test.lisp

(step-gen
   (seq -1 1)
   (ch 1 2 4 8 16 32))

You can now run cisp as follows:

Run a script (adding to anything that is running already)
cisp.py -i test.lisp -o output.ck -c +

Run a script, but remove anything that is running already
cisp.py -i test.lisp -o output.ck -c all

Replace the last added script
cisp.py -i test.lisp -o output.ck -c replace

Using sublime build script or visual studio code:

While live coding, I use build-scripts of my code editor (sublime text) to send the .lisp code to the cisp.py script. You can find the example setup as cisp.sublime-build, although you will have to adjust paths to your own system.

Basic syntax

non-standard synthesis

(step-gen [amp] [number-of-samples])

• white noise *

	(step-gen 
  		(rv -1 1) 
  		(st 1))

• very fast sequencer

	(step-gen
  		(seq -1 1) // seq loops through a list ad infinitum -1 1 -1 1 -1 1 etc..
  		(seq 10 11 12 11 100 1100)) 

• gendy like

	(fun amp
		(bounded-walk -1 1 (ch -0.01 0.01))) // bounded-walk min max step

	(fun tim
		(bounded-walk 1 100 (ch -1 1))) // this is time steps

	(step-gen
		(seq amp amp amp amp)
		(seq tim tim tim tim)) 

(t
	(seq 10 20 30)
	(ch 1 2 3 5))
	

easy bus

(~ casper (rv 1 100)) creates a bus

(~ casper) to read back the bus somewhere else (note, these are completely global)

define table

(# casper (fillf 32 0 128))

write to table

(~ foo (write casper (rv -1 1) (count 128))

The arguments for write are: table name, value generator, write index into the table.

which can be scheduled as (schedule (~ foo) (st 0.5)) // which means that foo is executed each 0.5 seconds

You can also use a more direct notation, for example:

(samp-schedule ARG1 ARG2)

evaluates its ARG1 stream each ARG2 samples.

(samp-schedule (write casper (rv -1 1) (count 128)) (st 1))